CTMP 4105

In the latter half of the nineteenth-century a number of European thinkers and writers came to sense a profound loss of meaning and significance at work in their culture. The term that was coined to describe this experience was "nihilism." The purpose of this course is to explore the thought of those who gave expression to this new phenomenon. We will begin with the literary explorations of Dostoyevsky and Baudelaire, and then turn to the thought of Nietzsche as the most complete explication of European nihilism. The course will conclude by considering the twentieth-century's most important commentator on nihilism, Martin Heidegger. In particular, the course will consider Martin Heidegger's set of lectures from the late 1930s that were published as Nietzsche. This set of lectures as reflections on Nietzsche's account of European nihilism formed, according to Heidegger's own recounting, a crucial transition in his own thought, the famous "turn" from the "early" to the "late" Heidegger. This course will examine the lecture series in the context of Heidegger's other writings at this time and his much-debated involvement with Nazism to try to understand the exact nature and import of his "turn." In all of this the course will be exploring the connections between a deep cultural experience - that of European nihilism and its social and political implications.